2008 July | Urban Mainframe

Archive for July 2008

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TimeMachineEditor

TimeMachineEditor is software for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard that lets you change the default one-hour backup interval of Time Machine. You can change the interval or decide to make daily, weekly and monthly backups.

This is useful if you don’t need to backup every hour or don’t want the associated performance penalty. This is also especially […]

WarGames: A Look Back at the Film That Turned Geeks and Phreaks Into Stars

Over the years, WarGames has written itself into the cult lore of Silicon Valley. Google hosted a 25th-anniversary screening in May, where keyboard jockeys cheered Broderick’s DOS acrobatics. “Many of us grew up with this movie,” Google cofounder Sergey Brin told the packed house. “It was a key movie of a generation, especially for those of us […]

simple.business

Just discovered a rather tasty WordPress theme called “simple.business” that I think I’m going to use for an upcoming project. It’s a nice clean design, contemporary and with a lovely random header image. Looks pretty slick.

24th Anniversary Macintosh

An Apple Macintosh 512k upgraded to run OS X by replacing the innards with a modern Mac Mini and various supporting components, including a grayscale CRT monitor, an LS-120 floppy disk drive, and a microcontroller-based USB device that interfaces the Mini to the original keyboard and mouse.

Roy Block

An experimental sort of game, with a tangible interface that touches the field of mixed reality. The game features a self-willed heroine who is trying to get from the very left to the very right of the screen without touching the bottom and dying. However there is nothing she can stand and jump on so […]

MyAppleSpace

Founded in April 2008, to mark the birthday of Apple’s cofounder Steve Jobs’s birthday. Despite limited press reaction MyAppleSpace slowly grew in members as an underground movement, from mouth to mouth. At the time of writing, MyAppleSpace has gained its 500th member - and the community is growing.

Intrinsic Nature

I’ve been rendered speechless by the quality and beauty of the artwork featured on Intrinsic Nature. Head on over there now for some gorgeous eye-candy.

»gen«

A theme for WordPress and an experiment aimed at exploring the possibilies of generative web-design. »gen« is not a fixed design but changes its appearance (layout, typography, colours and background images) over time depending on the content of your website. It’s not yet ready for release, so in the meantime visit www.kingcosmonaut.de/gen to stay updated. Sounds Intriguing. [via]

Views of Jupiter

I’ve been fascinated with all things Jupiter ever since I read Arthur C. Clarke’s Space Odyssey series. The photographs on “The Big Picture” took my breath away, awesome photography of the giant planet.

Clock of the Long Now

“I want to build a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every one hundred years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium. I want the cuckoo to come out every millennium for the next 10,000 years.”

// Asides

# 10 Plug-ins to Enhance QuickLook: QuickLook is one of Mac OS X Leopard's most valuable functions: it allows you to view the contents of a file without opening it, by simply pressing the space bar. Unfortunately, some files are not displayed as standard and some operations are not possible. Well, third party plug-ins are here to help. Here’s a list of 10 excellent plugins to enhance QuickLook with useful new features.

# Sphinx: A standalone search engine, meant to provide fast, size-efficient and relevant full-text search functions to other applications. Sphinx was specially designed to integrate well with SQL databases and scripting languages. Currently built-in data sources support fetching data either via direct connection to MySQL or PostgreSQL, or using XML pipe mechanism (a pipe to indexer in special XML-based format which Sphinx recognizes). [via]

# 8 Fantastic "How-to" Websites: There's always something that you need to know how-to do. And need to know in a hurry. There are a number of dedicated how-to Web sites that will tell and show you just about everything you need to know. Sometimes even more than that. A word of caution: these sites can be addictive. Use them wisely.

# How To Create WordPress Themes from Scratch: A three part series covering structuring, designing in Photoshop, slicing, coding into fully CSS-based XHTML, and finally WordPress implementation.

# WarGames: A Look Back at the Film That Turned Geeks and Phreaks Into Stars: Over the years, WarGames has written itself into the cult lore of Silicon Valley. Google hosted a 25th-anniversary screening in May, where keyboard jockeys cheered Broderick's DOS acrobatics. "Many of us grew up with this movie," Google cofounder Sergey Brin told the packed house. "It was a key movie of a generation, especially for those of us who got into computing." Wired takes a nostalgic trip back in time...

# Roy Block: An experimental sort of game, with a tangible interface that touches the field of mixed reality. The game features a self-willed heroine who is trying to get from the very left to the very right of the screen without touching the bottom and dying. However there is nothing she can stand and jump on so she needs the player to help her. The player has two small wooden blocks, in each hand one. Pressed on the screen they are being recognised by the game and the heroine can jump on them. To make the game even more challenging there are hazardous flower-like enemies who try to destroy the heroine when she comes too close.

# MyAppleSpace: Founded in April 2008, to mark the birthday of Apple's cofounder Steve Jobs's birthday. Despite limited press reaction MyAppleSpace slowly grew in members as an underground movement, from mouth to mouth. At the time of writing, MyAppleSpace has gained its 500th member - and the community is growing.

# »gen«: A theme for WordPress and an experiment aimed at exploring the possibilies of generative web-design. »gen« is not a fixed design but changes its appearance (layout, typography, colours and background images) over time depending on the content of your website. It’s not yet ready for release, so in the meantime visit www.kingcosmonaut.de/gen to stay updated. Sounds Intriguing. [via]